In the two hundred years that have passed since the death of Napoleon Bonaparte, the epoch to which he gave his name—an accolade unique in the historical usage: we do not, for example, speak of the years from 1933 to 1945 as the Hitlerian age—has become one of the most well-studied periods in European history. Thus, the flood of publications has been boundless and continues to flow unchecked. However, until relatively recently, the vast majority of the works on offer have been very traditional in their approach with the focus very much on biographies of the French ruler and his leading contemporaries, narratives of the military campaigns, or studies of individual battles. Lamentably enough, much of what appears in print continues to conform to this model, but the past three or four decades have seen the emergence of a “new Napoleonic history” that is far more analytical in character and bent on taking the subject in new directions: one might think here of the monographs of Frederick Schneid, Samuel Mustaffa, and Jaroslav Czubaty on the Kingdom of Italy, the Kingdom of Westphalia, and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, of Michael Broer’s many volumes on Italy (see below), and, finally, if he may make so bold, the current author’s extensive work on the Peninsular War. That said, particularly if one restricts oneself to those studies written or available in English, the number of these new-style publications remains relatively limited, and it is therefore a pleasure always to welcome fresh contributions to the fold. In this review, then, we shall first look at two such works, both of which should be of considerable interest to readers of the Journal of Mediterranean Studies.To start with, then, we have The Napoleonic Mediterranean, this being a splendid example of the sort of detailed regional study which has been one of the pillars of the modern historiography. Nor, given the identity of its author, is this remotely surprising. Over the past twenty years, building on the work of such scholars as Geoffrey Ellis, Michael Broers has established himself as one of the leading British authorities on the Napoleonic empire and, more particularly, Napoleonic Italy. Thus setting aside his acclaimed three-volume history of Napoleon, the last part of which is due out early in 2023, his works include the highly influential Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815 (Edward Arnold, 1996), The Napoleonic Empire in Italy: Cultural Imperialism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), Politics and Religion in Napoleonic Italy: The War against God, 1801–1814 (Routledge, 2007), and Napoleon’s Other War: Bandits, Rebels and Their Pursuers in the Age of Revolutions (Peter Lang, 2010). All this being the case, any new publication on his part cannot but be most welcome, and in this respect The Napoleonic Mediterranean does not disappoint: far from it, indeed.Let us begin by examining the parameters which Broers set for himself. Insofar as these are concerned, this is not some work of military narrative that examines how the Mediterranean region as a whole was caught up the Napoleonic Wars. what we have is rather a discussion of the effect that incorporation into the grand empire, whether as satellite states or pays réunis, had on the various states, regions, provinces, and, if one may be so bold, “geographical expressions” that were either washed by the waves of what Napoleon would doubtless love to have described as Mare Nostrum, or could be included within the compass of its littoral. Checked in his career though the emperor was—it was only thanks to the outbreak of the Peninsular War that a budding scheme for the partition of the Ottoman Empire that would have brought him Achaia, Libya and Egypt never came to pass—the list is still an imposing one, embracing, as it does, the so-called Illyrian provinces, Catalonia, the whole of Italy other than Sicily and Sardinia, Corfu, and much of present-day Slovenia and Croatia. As to why these acquisitions fell into the hands of the French, Broers is a little coy: while we hear a little about the need to enforce the Continental Blockade, there is nothing on either Napoleon’s naked aggression or his self-evident desire to incorporate ever larger parts of Europe into his war machine, not to mention the fact that the end goal of the reforming impetus that was so characteristic of his rule was in his eyes purely pragmatic (in brief, more men, more money, the attraction of the “masses of granite,” and the preservation of order). What we get, then, is rather an extremely well-founded discussion of the progress which the French administrators, and the collaborators who for a long time rallied to their cause, made in advancing the cause of reform.Insofar as this last was concerned, one thing should be recognized from the start, this being that, however cynical their master may have been, the men concerned were wedded to reform for its own sake: if the Frenchmen were caught up in misty dreams of a civilizing mission, the locals with whom they found themselves working, most of them officials or magistrates of the ancien régime, were often committed to the pursuit of concrete goals that had been embraced by the rulers whom they served many years before the coming of the French. In the context of the regions under discussion, meanwhile, the zeal that was everywhere on display was wholly understandable: feudalism was not just present as some relic of the past but a burden that was often onerous in the extreme; notwithstanding years of struggle on the part such rulers as Charles III of Spain and Joseph II of Austria, the Catholic Church enjoyed considerable power; poverty was widespread and economic development at best patchy; legal systems were archaic and convoluted, if not corrupt and inaccessible; and the omnipresent mountains were swarming with bandits and smugglers and in many instances all but untouched by the authority of the state.Whatever the wider context, then, the reform movement is no invention of the legend of Saint Helena, while its agents were in many instances sincere individuals possessed of the highest of ideals. That said, their achievements were by no means as impressive as they doubtless hoped. In part, this was because of issues of time, the only area looked at by Broers that was under French or proto-French administration for the full length of the Napoleonic epoch (in itself a mere fifteen years) being the valley of the River Po, while in some areas, too, military factors were available to take the blame, as in Catalonia where the reach of the imperial administration was restricted to two small areas centered on Barcelona and Gerona. However, as Broers shows, the fundamental problem was Napoleon’s constantly reiterated insistence that French models—above all, the Civil Code—should be implemented in their entirety, this being something that frequently drove a wedge between French officials and their generally speaking equally reformist indigenous counterparts. To make matters worse, meanwhile, the personnel dispatched from Paris were almost to a man possessed of an overwhelming sense of cultural superiority that often led them either wholly to despise the men among whom they found themselves or at the very least to dismiss their arguments. In consequence, a happy situation it was not, and Broers is much to be congratulated for giving us so much information on the manner in which this came about, and, by extension, the failure of reform in at the very least a substantial part of the Napoleonic empire.Moving on, we come to Alexander Mikaberidze’s Global History of the Napoleonic Wars. Ranging, as it does, from, among many other places, the Mississippi to Moscow, the Arctic Circle to Algiers and the Cape to Calcutta, this is a narrative of the age of Napoleon that explicitly challenges the strongly Eurocentric character of the majority of the existing historiography. In fairness, Mikaberidze is not quite the first to go down this road, for in both his 2007 Napoleon’s Wars: An International History and the second edition of his Wars of Napoleon (two very similar books notwithstanding the unfortunate similarity in the titles), the current author strove to point out that discussion of the period could not afford to exclude its multiple ramifications in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. However, particularly given his access to Russian sources, Mikaberidze has been able greatly to expand on these beginnings, not least by offering detailed accounts of events in such little-known areas as Persia and the Caucasus. Why, though, should his new work appeal to those interested in the Mediterranean region? In the first place, the issue is simply one of coverage—thanks to the overwhelming focus on Napoleon himself, with the exception of the expedition to Egypt, there has until recently been very little in the traditional literature on the campaigns in the Mediterranean. Yet, though valid enough, this is not the most important reason for featuring A Global History of the Napoleonic Wars in these pages. Thus, what matters is rather the dramatic impact that the period had on “the inner sea” and its littoral. In this respect, the list is long indeed: the naval power of Spain was utterly eliminated; the Italian Peninsula was subjected to a brusque campaign of reform that could be said to have laid the ground for the later risorgimento; the first signs emerged of the nationalism that would one day win Greece and the other Balkan states their independence; and, finally, if it effectively saw off Napoleon in 1798–99, the Ottoman Empire was gravely weakened by a series of internal revolts that set back the cause of modernization for many years and stripped it of Egypt, this last proceeding to emerge as a powerful modern state and, with it, a new player in the Mediterranean world. Once again, it has to be said that much of what Mikaberidze retails can be found elsewhere, as, for example, in Stanford Shaw’s exhaustive history of the Ottoman Empire, but readers will nevertheless find his collation of all the available material a valuable resource as well as a real pleasure to read.Thus far, this article has considered only works that can be considered part of the newer historiography of the Napoleonic Age. Alongside the works of Broers and Mikaberidze, however, we also have a good example of its predecessor, namely Gareth Glover’s The Forgotten War against Napoleon: Conflict in the Mediterranean, 1793–1815. Thus, relatively slim and with little in the way of pretension, this is a straightforward narrative that sticks firmly to a discussion of the military and naval events that took place in the “inner sea” in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age. For many academic readers, such a description will be enough completely to alienate them and deny the book even so much as a passing glance. It has to be said, though, that attitudes of this sort are less than helpful. Not only is Glover likely to engage with a larger number of the reading public than Broers and possibly even Mikaberidze, in which respect be it said that the ever increasing tendency of the historical discipline to march deeper and deeper into scholasticism and thereby condemn itself to irrelevance is the single greatest threat to the latter’s survival as a subject of study, but narrative cannot but remain at the heart of what we do. Thus, Broers can write as eruditely as he likes of Italy, but to try to read his work without a sense of the context and chronology of that proverbial “geographical expression” would be self-defeating in the extreme. Let us not, then, exclude Gareth Glover from our consideration, and all the more so given the fact that, self-made though he is, over many years he has made a very valuable contribution to the historiography via the publication of a seemingly endless series of firsthand accounts of the Napoleonic Wars, many of them hitherto completely unknown. Meanwhile, while much of the contents will either be well-known to students of the French Wars—the story of the campaigns in Egypt between 1798 and 1801 has been told countless times, for example—or, at least, easily accessible to them—one thinks here of the campaigns in eastern Spain—there is yet considerable material that does not feature very much anywhere else, this being particularly true of the numerous amphibious operations undertaken by the British in the Adriatic in the period after 1809, operations that in their own small way undoubtedly fueled British philo-Hellenism.To conclude, then, we have here three very different books that can all be said to make a useful contribution to the study of the Mediterranean region in the Napoleonic period. Extremely diverse in terms of their concept, approach, and chronological spread, they can all be read with profit and in many ways complement one another very neatly. One feels that here and there, there is more to say—Glover’s brief references to popular uprisings in the hinterland of Cattaro and Ragusa (modern-day Kotor and Dubrovnik) toward the end of the French Wars being tantalizing in the extreme, what is particularly clear is the need for a monograph on the experiences of the Balkan peoples in the age of Napoleon. However, that is all to the good: it would be a sad moment, indeed, if the tumultuous years from 1789 to 1815 were finally to be stripped of their capacity for future study.